Defining conservatism
To be conservative... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
— Michael Oakeshott
The conscience of the conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being. Today, therefore, he is at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally with those gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race.
— Barry Goldwater
The conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
— Russell Kirk
Social theory in the West has recognized that society is in a continual state of dynamic tension and change, and therefore conservatism, like any other social philosophy, must be in part a theory of change. It must recognize change, advocate it, and resist it, as the case may be. But conservatism as a living political force has not believed that society can be made static by human political art or prudence, nor can one say that the articulate conservatives have advocated such a situation as an ideal. Conservatism is rather, in this respect, a philosophy of social evolution, in which certain lasting values are defended within the framework of the tension of political conflict..... Conservatism is primarily a spirit animating political behavior, it is a way of life, and it is a manner of judging life.
— Francis Graham Wilson
Conservatism is a structure of thought, a style, it seems to me, as well as a set ofpolitical dispositions toward state and society. Thirty years ago, while still a graduate student at Berkeley, I came across the writings of the post-Revolutionary conservatives in Europe: Louis de Bonald, Joseph Marie de Maistre, Edmund Burke, Georg Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig von Haller, and, somewhat later, the greatest of them, Alexis de Tocqueville (in whose genius, to be sure, lay both liberalism and conservatism. History has made the latter dominant, however.) It seemed to me then, and still does now, that these works told me things about the nature of power and society that I had not gotten from my more or less conventional education as an undergraduate and that the basic perspectives of the conservatives are useful to historical and social analysis irrespective of whether one is himself conservative, liberal, or radical .... Movements of ideas in history are important to us chiefly for the degree of perspective they provide in the understanding of the world around us. The conservatives were prophets of the past. They were out of sympathy with the world that was being born, nostalgic, and frequently the victims of romantic archaism. So much is true. But they had two overriding excellences that their rationalist-liberal contemporaries did not have: First, they began not with an imaginary natural order—with a set of natural rights, liberties, and harmonies—but with the actual institutions, groups, and social roles that they found around them.... Second, the conservatives had a profound sense of historical development and, with this, a sense of the ineffaceability of the historical record that lies in traditions and customs. Man’s identity, they declared, almost in the words of contemporary historical psychology, has roots in times as well as in space.
— Robert Nisbet
The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approximation.
— Richard Weaver
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.
— Roger Scruton